Two Beasts

(This was my speech for the 2004 Toastmasters International Speech Contest. For the first time in several years I didn't even get past the club level. Barry Manilow once sang, "This one will never sell, they'll never understand ..." I think that fits pretty well. I don't think I had much choice, though, but to do this speech at this time. And, of course, I ended up performing it that evening in Burien, when she was there ... )

The very last time I saw her was on a sidewalk outside a comedy club in downtown Seattle. It was autumn, and for weeks the leaves had been slowly changing until suddenly there was a richness of color everywhere. That night, the last glow of sunset lit in the old brick of Pioneer Square a russet fire.

She jumped out of her car and ran across the street to where I stood. The unexpected sight of her knocked the breath out of me. We stood there in the first cold wind of fall and grinned at each other, totally ignoring the people who were with us.

I couldn’t begin to tell you what she was wearing, but I can tell you how locks of her hair spilled across her forehead, how the sunset splashed over the curve of her cheek – I can describe the exact color and timbre of her voice.

She rushed all over herself talking, laughing – everything but blushing. I hadn’t seen her in so long that I almost forgot how she affected me, like pure oxygen, like the bubbles in champagne, like the animals in a Disney movie! She was intoxicating.

After a short few minutes we hugged – as gently as if we were handling explosives, – even though I wanted to clasp her fiercely against me until neither one of us could breathe.

“Beauty and the Beast”: The story of my life. The Beast believes he is doomed to remain a monster until a Beauty comes along who can love him in spite of his beastliness. Of course, adults know it doesn’t work that way. The problem with beauty and the beast is that very few of us ever really see ourselves as beauties. And two beasts is a very difficult hand to play.

I had given her a Christmas card the year before, with a line inside that I stole from the movie “As Good As It Gets.”-- From the scene where Helen Hunt is trying to get a compliment out of Jack Nicholson. He haltingly explains to her that, even though he hates – hates – taking pills, on the morning after she first visited his apartment, he decided to start taking the medication for his obsessive compulsive condition. She’s lost, she doesn’t understand how that is a compliment. Until he explains, almost as if the words are painful, “You make me want to be a better man.”

I wrote that in the card and she looked at it in disbelief. She told me later that the sentiment awed her. She said, “You don’t have any idea what I’m really like.”

You see, in her mind, she was the Beast.

Because of who I am, because of things I’ve done, because of all the garbage I believe about myself, I was sure she couldn’t love me. Because of things that had happened to her, because of all the junk she believed about her self, she was sure that if I thought I loved her, it was only because I didn’t really know her.

I could see her light, her beauty, so clearly, even though most mornings I couldn’t look in the mirror without seeing myself as fat and unattractive and stupid.

There was a long moment, outside the comedy club, as she looked up at me, when I almost believed this incredible girl – who couldn’t say two sentences without apologizing for herself three times – might just see a light in me that I was blind to.

Two beasts. Two people who never had a chance to love each other, because they weren’t able to love themselves.


I turned forty this past year.

At forty you wake up and you realize, “I’m halfway through.” If I’m lucky, I’m halfway through. You look back on your life so far, all the places and people you’ve known, all the things you’ve done, the experiences you’ve tasted – it seems so vast and you think, “There could still be this much more!”

But forty is also a time when you start to think about limitations. About goals not met and promises not kept. You begin to regret every day you’ve sleepwalked through and feel the weight of every moment when you aren’t moving forward. At forty you begin to wonder how many rooms you’ve walked out of for the last time, how many doors you’ve closed that you’ll never reopen.

And you find yourself standing on a sidewalk, in an autumn sunset, watching a woman, who is simply the most attractive woman you have ever known, walk away. And you think, “How many more chances do I get at love?”